which has made him so
powerful a man of business, owes little to the higher virtues. He has
found the plain of life too full of absorbing interest and too crowded
with abounding opportunities for getting on to raise his eyes to the
mountains. This is not to say that he is a man of no ideals, but to say
that his ideals are of too practical and prosaic a kind ever to stir the
pulses with excitement.

Nevertheless I regard him as a born statesman, and could wish that the
conditions of political life made it more easy for a man of his gifts to
serve the country than men with the gifts of, let us say, Dr. Macnamara
or Sir Hamar Greenwood.

The world knows so little of him that perhaps I may begin my political
reflections in this case with a brief summary of his career, such
details of a business man's biography as may contribute to an
understanding of his character.

Andrew Weir, as he was in those days, went to school at Kirkcaldy, where
he was chiefly notable for seeking information on more subjects than
came under the jurisdiction of his pedagogue's ferule. A benign Rosa
Dartle might have been his godmother. He was for ever consulting
encyclopaedias and books of reference. However badly he knew his Greek
verbs or his Latin syntax he had a very shrewd and curious knowledge of
the world when he left school at fifteen to enter the local branch of
the Commercial Bank of Scotland.

At school he had wanted to own ships. This ambition still lodged in his
brain. His thoughts were all at sea. There was no romance in the world
so pleasing to his soul as the romance of the merchant marine. He had a
real passion for harbours. He loved the idea of far voyages. The smells
of cargoes and warehouses composed a sea-bouquet for him which he
esteemed sweeter than all the scents of hedges and wood. If there was a
big man for him in the world it was the sailor.

I don't think he had so profound a feeling for bankers. Not quite so
downright as Lord Leverhulme in stating his opinion of bankers, Lord
Inverforth nevertheless regards them on the whole as lacking in courage
and imagination. He said to himself on his banker's stool, "I will learn
all I can, but I won't stay here; I'll be a shipowner."

In his twentieth year he bought a sailing ship. This was at Glasgow in
the year 1885. He called himself Andrew Weir and Co. He had the feeling
that sailing ships, engaged in coastwise trade, might be bigger. He
announced his intention of build